Oh Shit: The Bare Sticks Are Back!

Dear Internets:

Things are rough here in the Yan Xishan camp. Two weeks back, after a night of heavy drinking, I was curled up on my kang, most thankful that the thick coal smoke that forms Taiyuan’s natural weather patterns was keeping the sun at bay. Just at that moment, my #6 wife asked me to let her visit her natal family, and in my still inebriated state, I allowed her to depart. If I was in my right mind, I never would have let her go. Not only do I rely on her for daily massages, ear cleanings, and sexual services, but her hometown is precariously close to the damn Jin-Cha-Ji base area. Before I even finished sobering up over my mid-day bowl of noodles and vinegar, the report came back–she had been communized! Yes, she had disappeared into the Red Zone. I imagine she must have at least four peasant husbands. What an abomination!

In my grief, I quickly ordered a search for a replacement for wife #6, plus two more wives as insurance. As I await their arrival, I have had much time to reflect on my bountiful harem, versus the sorry lot of the dirty unwashed peasant hordes. I have realized now that Mao, Liu, Zhou, and all those other peasant-fuckers are on to something. They have the power of the bare sticks.

The bare stick (光棍), for those of you who are lucky enough not to be in the know, is the unmarried man in the Chinese countryside. If you are slow, please allow me to break down this metaphor for you. The “stick” is the penis. It is bare because it has no vagina to cover it. Got it? Cool, let’s move on.

Well, these bare sticks are, to coin a phrase, shit out of luck. They are too poor to afford a wife (to say nothing of the multiple wives that a real man should have), and as such they pretty much fail at life. No way to have sons, which means the ancestral line dies out. Plus, no vagina, which sucks when human nature is telling you to cover your stick. By that I mean put your dick in a vagina. So sometimes you have a bunch of bare sticks, they all have sticks (by which I mean dicks) but no place to put them, so they have to practice what industry professionals call alternative sexual survival strategies. That means, well fuck, you are just going to have to figure that out for yourself.

So Mao, because he spends so much time hanging out with these dudes, has realized that they will do anything to get just a share of a woman. And if you count up all of my wives, and all of the wives and girlfriends of my coal boss buddies, there is a serious fucking imbalance at work. Dynasties have been toppled by bare stick armies, and unless I do something to get peasants laid, my time at the top might be short as well.

Here Mao tells Yan'an peasants how they might finally get laid

So far I have considered two options. The first is to outlaw concubinage, so that Chinese elites could only have one wife. Then I realized that this was a really fucking stupid idea. So I have settled on option #2–importing Russian brides for Chinese peasants. It seems that Russian men, besides being stinking barbarians, also enjoy drinking themselves to death a young age, leaving lots of ladies for the taking. I will import these ladies and distribute them to my peasants. Sure, I am sure that they will not take kindly to marrying so low on the social ladder, but they will get used to it.

Problem solved. And people wonder why they call me the Model Governor!

And now I can enjoy my many wives as the peasants enjoy their Russian brides. But what of areas under the control of the Commies? If they cannot steal my wives, how will they solve their bare stick problem? Plus I hear that in the countryside there are more and more men for fewer and fewer women. You think Mao Zedong Thought is going to be a good substitute for vagina? Without a leader of my genius, how are they to solve their bare stick problem?

Shit, that reminds me. No one tell the Commies about the Russian bride thing.

Confucius, in his time, also was in the business of helping peasants with their 光棍 problems. Good solutions like your widow recycling project are the bedrock of successful leadership.

In the Analects, Confucius helps his his followers mediate a dispute over who gets to ‘love’ a particular sheep to which one follower is particularly attached. You see, there was a tradition that peasants would swap sex sheep around on the first of each lunar month, and it often caused a great deal of tension.

In the following quotation, we are given insight into the use of sheep as 光棍 sheaths, and also into the magnanimity leaders must posess to ensure their subjects’ sexual satisfaction.

3.18 子贡(1)欲去告朔(2)之饩羊(3)。子曰：“赐也！尔爱(3)其羊，我爱其礼。”

Notes:
(1)子贡: Zi Gong, a follower of Confucius
(1)告朔: The first of the lunar month
(2)饩羊: Sex sheep

Translation:
Zi Gong could not bear to part with his favorite sex sheep on the first of the month as tradition dictated. Confucius spoke unto him, “Give up your sex sheep! You may love this sheep, but I love virtue.”

To extrapolate this to a much broader scope, I think Confucius meant that sometimes we need to give up the sheep we most like fucking for the good of all.